“Nathan Davis writes music that deals deftly and poetically with timbre and sonority.... Mr. Davis’s “de clocher à clocher” (“from steeple to steeple”), a phrase from Rimbaud, teemed with bell tones. Mr. Davis’s refined ear was instantly evident in the work’s chaste opening bars: soft glockenspiel tones ringing over gingerly scraped crotales (antique cymbals); gentle chords played at a piano’s high end; and lower piano strings bowed with a thin filament, with screws jangling among them. Metal pipes rapped with soft mallets rang like church bells and pinged like flagpoles; microphones waved to and fro made the sounds wobble and pulse. Gongs — two hidden offstage and two suspended from the ceiling — murmured and roared, saturating the resonant room. Mr. Davis shepherded balances from a console behind the audience.”